China and Hong Kong have tough drug smuggling laws that foreigners caught attempting to bring illegal drugs end up in jail, whether they are beauty queens or transgenders aspiring to become a woman one day.
Just because 22-year-old Juliana Lopez Sarrazola was the Miss Colombia who scheduled to compete in the Miss World beauty pageant in December 2015 in China did not gave her immunity from arrest. The beauty queen was caught with 610 grams of cocaine hidden in her laptop at Guangzhou Airport on July 18, reported South China Morning Post.
Because she wanted to raise funds for her travel, Lopez Sarrazola attempted to borrow money from a man whom she only knows by his first name, Sergio. He promised to pay her $2,500 if she agreed to smuggle the cocaine, reported Fox News.
Drugs smugglers caught in China are either executed or given life sentence which was the bleak future the beauty queen faced rather than the Miss World crown she aspired to wear. Fortunately for Lopez Sarrazola, the court believed in her explanation that she was forced to serve as Sergio’s drug mule under threat of him killing her family if she did not cooperate.
Lopez Sarrazola showed the text messages as proof which the People’s Intermediate Court of Guangzhou believed and gave the beauty queen a 15-year sentence instead. There is a possibility that if she shows good behavior while in prison, her sentence would be reduced to seven or eight years, and after that she would be deported to Colombia, the drug capital of the world.